qoncept BLOG

Do you know the Snowblower
Effect? Well lucky you, because I didn’t know it until some weeks ago… Heavy
snowfalls were crossing Austria, bringing lots and lots of snow to the Alpine
regions with all the adverse effects of roadblocks because of avalanches, people
locked in remote valleys not being able to get to work, and then again with
kids happily building a whole family of snowmen. On a personal level, it mainly
meant getting up even earlier in the morning, grab the snow shovel and clear
the snow out of the driveway.
Now it happened that I had been having a chitchat with one of my friends. Talking
about this and that we finally arrived at the tons of snow that each of us had
been clearing out of driveways twice a day. And then it happened: The
Snowblower Effect! My friend just said, “You know what, man? I am going to buy a
snowblower right now! I don’t care about the costs, I just want it now and I am
fed up with the shoveling stuff!”

I had spent a
few days thinking about my friend's decision and why it was so easy for him to
spend lots of money just to save work. Finally, I understood ... He had
obviously seen the personal benefit that investing in a snowblower would result
in 15 minutes more sleep in the morning and – more importantly – rest his
aching back. He was ready to spend the money because he recognized a personal
advantage. That's what I call the Snowblower Effect.

A few days
later, our team had a great presentation at one of our potential customer to
showcase what was possible with the investment into modern software: process
optimization software that reduces employees' day-to-day work and optimizes
processes and reduces costs. Certainly, you have already guessed it … the
digital transformation stuff! You have probably already guessed the customer’s feedback
too. Right… “Very interesting, we see the huge potential. We will need to
discuss it internally and come back to you soon.” The customer reverted. Not
soon, but we received an answer:

“…Sorry for the late reply, you know, we have so much daily workload …
We are convinced that we have to work on our software systems. So, a next step
will be the formation of strategic innovation team. Then we start the strategy development process,
which will finally be discussed with our management. Hope we can convince them
too… We will come back to you once we have completed the
strategy development process.”

Now where is the Snowblower
effect in this one? We really tried to figure it out and for sure the first
question we discussed was about our performance. Were we really able to
convince the customer of the benefits? How can we improve our presentations at
potential customers to be even more convincing?

Next to continuously improving
the way we approach customers, we also discussed what could be the reason for
not generating the Snowblower Effect? While it is so easy to spend your money
privately to save you just some minutes of work – professionally one would
initiate working groups, start strategic discussions, and so on. Implementing
an easy-going software project that saves you 1 hour of work every day and
money can be extremely difficult it seems. Obviously, decision-making must be
discussed in context of the organizational structures of companies. In fact, in
today's organizations, groups, teams or commissions make the majority of
decisions. The bigger team wins when pulling the rope – because a larger number
of people have more pulling power. But is that also true when it comes to
decision-making processes instead of rope pulling?

I will leave this question as
food for thoughts, but I cannot resist repeating the story that I had once
heard when a management consultant spoke about the development of Nokia and
their allegedly not-existing competition with Apple’s iPhone. At that time,
Nokia was selling 230 million phones, Apple was selling 1 million phones. When
the first iPhone was closely scrutinized during a Board meeting, the Chairman
of the Board would actually laugh smugly about the colored display, “What a
nonsense, the thing is only on the ear anyway…” Well … I am sure you all know
the end of the story.

Sometimes, it is better to
work on quick solutions that to wait for others to be quicker. Just think about
the Snowblower and the little work it will save you!